John Powys: The Brazen Head

It did not take Lil-Umbra long with her fifteen-year-old legs and her slender figure to scamper down the quarter-of-a-mile avenue of over-arching elms that led due eastward from the Fortress of Roque, where she lived, to the ancient circle of Druidic stones that had come to be known as “Castrum Sanctum”. Once only did she pause: and that was because something about the manner in which all the smaller twigs at the end of one of the branches clutched at each other and then let each other go arrested her attention. It made her think of a young man called Raymond de Laon: but she could not have explained to anyone, just why it did.

The avenue sloped down all the way from the Fortress of Roque to the camp, but before it reached the latter, which was a grassy enclosure littered with broken stones, the smoothness of its gradual descent was checked and impeded, or, if you were bold enough to take them in a flying leap, accelerated, by a couple of rather high and very massive marble steps.

Lil-Umbra had already made up her mind, after seeing each of her brothers come down with a disturbing if not a disastrous collapse, that such wild jumps were beyond what was expected even from a maid “of true Abyssum spirit”, as she had once heard herself described by her father to her mother. So she turned half round as she clambered down each of these two steps, touching with the tips of the fingers of one hand the slippery marble and giving a little tap on the ground with the toe of the foot that first came down, to make sure she wouldn’t slip or slide. Once safely on the level grass of the Castrum Sanctum she ran with a quick bounding step to three tall perpendicular stones which stood side by side in the centre of the enclosure.

During the whole of that January there had scarcely been one night of thaw, and as this was the dawn of the twenty-ninth and in a couple of days it would be the first of February, the day which was her father’s birthday, she had a particular reason of her own for approaching at this early hour those three upright stones.

It was Lil-Umbra’s special desire to see the sun rise that morning while the waning moon was still visible in the sky, but she never would have dared to dodge both Nurse Rampant and the Nurse’s assistant, old Mother Guggery, not to speak of Lady Val, her own devoted mother, if she hadn’t made an appointment to meet a person, not only respected by them all, but one who was intimately lodged in Sir Mort Abyssum’s trust and confidence.

This was none other than a gigantic Tartar whose life Sir Mort had saved when they both were surrounded in a half-crusading, half-plundering skirmish in Dalmatia, by an overpowering group of reckless Arab spearmen; and who in desperate gratitude had become his devoted slave for life.

Both the man’s parents had been now for a long time dead. Giants of his size were very rare among Mongolian Tartars but, all the same, Peleg inherited his gigantic stature and strength from his Tartar mother, while his name Peleg showed that his father was a Jew, and indeed the original Peleg, too many thousands of years ago to be numbered in centuries, was none other than the grandson of Salah who was the grandson of Shem who was the son of Noah.

But it was certainly no thought of Noah or any other Hebrew patriarch that drew from Lil-Umbra her cry of excited delight the moment she saw Peleg crouching behind one tall Druidic stone in that broken circle. She scampered up to him at once and when she found he was asleep she had no compunction about snatching at his sleeve and jerking it up and down to waken him.

Had the rounded rim of the suddenly-risen Sun not become at that moment a living presence in the very place where, only a pulse-beat before, there had been nothing but the deepening of a wide golden glow diffused over the whole horizon, it is likely enough that Peleg might have received a bewildering shock from Lil-Umbra’s leap into the enchanted pool of his dreams.

She certainly plunged in with a splash and the way she shook the giant’s sleeve was enough to have jerked any ordinary mystery-loving Mongolian out of the happiest phantasmagoria of delectable dreams.

But the sight of that red rim, all the redder from the patches of snow on the slope of the ridge and the nakedness of the tree-trunks between which it appeared, conveyed to the man in a flash the whole situation. The first move he made was to alter with scrupulous care the position of the colossal iron mace which was his habitual companion and which was surmounted by a round ball as big as any ordinary man’s head entirely covered by iron spikes. This weapon, which had been lying across his knees as he slept, with his back to the tallest stone of that forlorn remnant of a Druidic Circle, he now laid carefully on the frozen grass at his side and welcomed his master’s daughter with a grave smile.

That little lady, delighted at having so successfully thrust her slight warmly-clad boreal body between the ancestral pillars of the mystic avenue to her friend’s oriental dream-dome, didn’t restrain herself in the least, now that he was awake, from pelting him with a shower of questions, confessions, declarations, and suggestions.

But it was not long before the gigantic Oriental and the young European were equally under the spell of that magnetic red orb which did not take many minutes to be half-way over the ridge that formed the eastern horizon of the Manor of Roque.

The Manor had only been in Sir Mort’s hands for a little over twenty years; but that had been quite long enough for himself and Lady Val, and their sons Tilton and John who were approaching twenty and their daughter Lil-Umbra, who would be sixteen in a month, to have grown intimately familiar with the fitful moods of the seasons in this part of Wessex, and with the particular enchantments worked upon this landscape by the Sun and the Moon in their variable seasons.

All five of them, the parents equally with their children, had established between themselves and both these heavenly bodies those private, individual, and even secretive personal relations that most human beings on this earth, whether old or young, though with very different degrees of intensity, instinctively reach.

“Well, here I am, Peleg!” gasped the young girl. “And O! how red the Sun is! It’s almost frighteningly red, isn’t it — rather like the Sun in that window in the Priory chapel — you know the window I mean? — that they say is a picture of the Last Day, when both Sun and Moon are to be soaked in blood. What things they do tell us, Peleg! I don’t believe a word of it; do you? I bet you don’t, any more than I do! It’s getting too much what these priests and monks tell us! Has John talked to you about what they’ve done to his master Friar Bacon, the learnedest man in the kingdom? Shut him up, they have, because he won’t believe their lies; and when he wants books and things — things he has to have if he’s to work at his inventions — they do their best to stop him from getting them!

“Do you know what came into my head the other day, Peleg? And it was because of that that I wanted you to show me the Moon this morning — no! wait a second—” and the girl laid her hand on the back of the tightening and stiffening fingers by which the man was preparing to heave himself up from the ground—“It came into my head that perhaps even my father didn’t really believe in all the things they try to make us swallow — and I can tell you myself of one person who doesn’t, and that’s Raymond de Laon of Cone Castle over there”—and she waved her hand, the one that wasn’t being used to prevent his getting up, in a direction to the left of the now blazing Sun—“Raymond doesn’t even believe that Pontius Pilate wrote ‘King of the Jews’ upon the Cross — and think, Peleg, how exciting it would be if I were more like Father in my secret thoughts than like Mother or Nurse or old Guggery or Prior Bog. What do you yourself think about all these things?”